A lot of it comes from the various globe defining industries that emerge from here I’d say, along with the fact that every attempt at radical politics has been crushed into the dirt.

Syndacalysts? Explicitly banned in the 1800s.

Communist organizing undocumented people and dic workers? Crushed by a combination of white supremacists deputized by Herbert Hoover’s capitlist clique, and betrayed by New Deal politicians who defanged the unions.

The Black Panthers? Quid Pro Quo until it’s become a shell of its former self.

Not to mention that most of the newest and shiniest tools that the capitlist class uses to plunder the world often come directly from California. It’s foundational to the states identity and industry.

Our rail roads were due to massive speculative bubbles where various world conglomerates gambled away billions after being hoodwinked by charlatans, and that model of financial speculation became the main strategy our entrepreneurs would use. It’s called the Associates playbook after the original collection of snake oils who got rich off the rail road. Also rapacious hydraulic mining methods that literally destroy the faces of mountains were largely developed here by California engineers. These engineers were demanded across the imperial world to make plunder more efficient (which they were scarily good at), and they basically just copy pasted the associates model, restructuring extraction operations to make massive profits without even really increasing the yield of gold.

Herbert Hoover got famous for this as an example, along with doing things like restructuring the labor forces in the places he was sent to in order to stoke racial tensions and break workers solidarity.

If you list out the most important tools used by the capitlist class to rape the world through the last two centuries there’s a good fucking chance it was developed by Engineers in California. Radios for bombers during WWII, tons of weapons created by aerospace engineers, early computing for the military, massive social media, Uber (yeah just looked it up, and it’s from San Fran, which I expected), and probably whatever new terrors that will be developed. All of them were developed by the same speculative bubble model which always ends up fucking even the engineers over in the end.

With all that said, California capitalists have also always felt entitled to more control over US policy. It’s like they’ve got a chip on their shoulder against East Coast capitlists who they feel keep them out of the absolute power they deserve. Take the silicon valley oligarchs into consideration, they’re obviously oligarchs but they are still frothing at the mouth to have a bigger piece of the pie than the legacy capitalists on the other coast.

This resentment might be due to Stanford University’s eugenisist foundation, as that University is basically the ideological and material driver of our industry here in California. A feeling of being inherently superior but not being recognized as such and given the world on a platter.

For an actual analysis of California that’s more coherent and in depth, than I can’t recommend enough Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcom Harris.